Pollard Was No Pelton

Sometime before January 20, 2001, President Clinton will decide whether
to add the name of Jonathan Pollard to the list of those to whom he will
grant the executive clemency that presidents typically hand out at
the end of their terms. Campaigns for and against clemency for Pollard
are being waged just as they are in other cases.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Pollard's new attorneys are in court petitioning for
a review of Pollard's life sentence for spying for Israel, a review that
would almost certainly free him as a matter of right. The Pollard
attorneys' new motion is based on a recent Supreme court decision that
allows broader grounds on which to claim that a defendant received
ineffective representation.

The Pollard motion claims in part that his original attorney failed to
object to an egregiously false and inflammatory claim by the US
attorney, a claim the acceptance of which led the judge to impose the
drastic
sentence of life in prison, to wit that Pollard's espionage for Israel
was as serious a blow to the United States as that committed by one
Ronald Pelton on behalf of the Soviet Union. Pelton also received a life
sentence,
and the US attorney argued that so should Pollard.

The most obvious contrast between Pollard and Pelton is of course that
while the Soviet Union was America's mortal enemy, Israel is America's
lifelong ally. Judges and the public will readily decide the propriety
of the US government's original assertion that a spy for an ally should
be treated as harshly as one for the enemy just to send the right
"signal" to possible violators of security.

But neither the judges nor the public are equipped to evaluate the
government's 1987 contention, expressed by Assistant US attorney Charles
Leeper that Pollard was actually a worse offender than Pelton. Very few
people have had total access to the intelligence materials relevant to
both cases.

I am one of them, because I was one of the few who knew the details of
the highly restricted program that was betrayed by Pelton. Not even most
of the National Security Agency analysts who handled the take from the
program, and knew it as "Ivy Bells," knew the special naval means by
which it was gathered. I was also familiar with the much, much less
restricted data that Pollard gave away. And I am a serious student of
intelligence.

Hence I must begin by agreeing with Mr. Leeper's original argument, in
response to Pollard's attorney's request to see the assessment of the
damage that Pelton had done, that "[T]here is no rational relation
between the classified information compromised in Pelton and that
compromised by defendant here. . . .[T]he nature and volume of the
classified information compromised in these cases varies so
substantially that no basis exists for a comparison of the respective
damage assessments." Pollard had wanted access to the damage assessment
to make precisely that point. Had the Government and Mr. Leeper left it
at that, justice would have been served.

Instead, Leeper added, without giving any evidence, that Pollard had
done more damage than Pelton, that Pelton had received a life sentence,
implying that Pollard should get the same. Either Mr. Leeper had no
idea what he was talking about, or he outright lied.

Here is the outline of the facts: The special Navy program betrayed by
Pelton consisted of a series of recorders placed by US nuclear
submarines onto an undersea cable linking the Soviet naval bases of
Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk. Not only were the lives of US sailors in
danger during each mission. The take from the program provided the only
unencrypted intercepts of Soviet military command messages. We got
everything, from technological information to command procedures, to
operational patterns, to typical location of units, to plans, to a basis
for cryptologic analysis and much more. When the program was betrayed,
we were in the midst of a multi billion dollar effort to turn it into an
on line system that would have given us unambiguous warning of any
Soviet military move or plan. It was priceless. In the event of war, our
lives would have depended on it. Because of Pelton we lost what we had,
and had to give up on what we were working toward. No kidding there is
"no basis for comparison" with the Pollard case!

Pollard illegally provided to our Israeli allies mostly what they had
officially received from the US government prior to the US government's
anger over Israel's bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor. I know what
Israel was denied because the then Deputy Director of Central
Intelligence, Admiral Inman, explained it to me in detail. The list of
Pollard's give - aways matches that intelligence very closely. Arguments
about the propriety of US policy toward Iraq do not mean that Pollard
should not escaped punishment. He committed espionage and rightly went
to jail. But there is indeed "no basis for comparison" between the cases
of Pollard and Pelton. To suggest that comparable amounts of harm were
done and that the punishment should be comparable is either uninformed
or dishonest.

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston
University. He was a US naval officer, a Foreign Service Officer, and a
staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.